down to the river
by Anastasia-G
Summary: Bonnie knows she pushed him. But she hasn't moved, her arms and legs are still. There's only a sick throb at the base of her skull, like a fist smarting after a delivered blow. He's panting in the dust, blood-flecked teeth smiling. "I'm Kai, what's your name?" [AU in which Bonnie and Kai find each other and a way out of Mystic Falls]


**_A/N:_** So this is an (early) birthday gift for my dear friend **thefudge is grumpy**. Go send her good wishes and such on her blog or by reviewing her many excellent fics! I've never written Bonkai before so I'm really nervous about sharing this. I owe much inspiration to the birthday girl aka the #bonkaiqueen herself, and this fic is but a humble tribute. Please be gentle in the reviews! And, I'm so sorry if this is terrible D:

 **Trigger warnings:** Mentions of cancer. Gore and some violence and, oh yeah, a puppy dies. *hides*

* * *

 _us whose bodies tell terrible stories, horrible lies._

\- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasina

* * *

 **Mystic Falls, Virginia, 1982**

She's twelve years old when she comes home from school and finds her grandmother bludgeoned to death on her front porch.

Bonnie had imagined this moment many times over, replayed it in her mind so she'd be ready. But she'd pictured something more mundane: Sheila dead from a heart attack in the linoleum kitchen perhaps, surrounded by uncut lemons. Or keeled over in one of her flower beds that were actually patches of dirt and misshapen weeds. Nothing flowered in Mystic Falls. Not even dandelions.

But instead, Sheila Bennett is spread eagled next to her rocking chair, her brains omeletted in the sun. Bonnie takes two steps before the blood slimes her sneakers. Then, she screams.

She doesn't scream for help or out of fear. The former is unlikely to come, and the latter has no taste. When she was ten she'd snuck out to watch the sheriff drag Elena Gilbert's parents out of a ditch. It was a joint suicide, and the bodies emerged like mating fish struck dead in the act, flesh and mottled skin glued fast together.

She screams because she imagines that somewhere, in a town where green things grew, there's another Bonnie, a twin with pink ballet slippers and a grandmother and a father and a mother too, and maybe an apple tree and a bicycle, and _that_ Bonnie would scream. _That_ Bonnie deserved to scream.

She screams until her lungs burn and the fire crawls up her throat. The more she screams, the closer the sky gets, like the entire world is a snow-globe on some lunatic's shelf and she alone is rattling the glass. She screams until her voice breaks and tears ooze at the corners of her eyes.

And when the smoke of the afternoon dust clears and her own voice is no longer scraping the air, she sees him. An elfin creature with dark hair and dusty knees, looking at her like he wants to laugh.

He skips up the driveway and porch steps, squinting at Sheila's corpse like it's a pie he wants to guess the filling of. Bonnie notices he's about the same height as her, and maybe age too. This is not the twin she was screaming for, this runt of a boy who looks as sharp and strange as the weeds in the backyard.

"Is this your grandma?" he asks, fascinated.

"Yeah...," she hedges, crossing her arms. "Who're you?"

He grins like an imp, but the playfulness stretches thin, skin over some demented bone. He drags a finger along the thickly pooled blood with practiced ease. His hand, coated now with brain matter, disappears into his mouth. He sucks and swallows and then makes a bored face. "She doesn't taste like anything," he complains.

He tumbles down the steps. She's pushed him. Bonnie knows she pushed him. But she hasn't moved, her arms and legs are still. There's only a sick throb at the base of her skull, like a fist smarting after a delivered blow.

He's panting in the dust, blood-flecked teeth smiling. "I'm Kai, what's your name?"

* * *

The funeral is small, and cheap. She watches them lower the pinewood coffin into the ground and shuffles her feet impatiently as the old priest rambles on. Rudy - sober for once - cries noisily into his hand. His other palm rests heavy on her shoulder and she resists the urge to shrug it off.

The whole proceeding tires and bores her. She's not sad Sheila's in that coffin. She's sad there'll be no more lemonade, no more evening hours in the backyard with only the the _clip-clip_ of her grandmother's gardening shears, no more stories she couldn't always follow but liked hearing because Sheila would stroke her hair in the while.

She wants to scream again, but she's afraid. Afraid of who or what her scream will conjure.

Much later, when her dad's hunched over asleep on the couch and the few relatives have straggled off, she lets herself out, walks down the gravel road to the creek, past the sign with the skullish emblem warning about chemicals in the water. She isn't allowed here, no one is. But she'd rather this place than her father's whisky-smelling couch.

Sheriff Saltzman had come by to ask them questions, but that's all he ever did. Ask questions, then get drunk at the Grille. Sometimes he'd offer her old candy he kept in his pocket but she never took any. Sheila had warned her not to.

Bonnie leans over the water. _Plop, plop_. The tears go one by one.

When the ripples clear she sees _his_ face and quickly wipes her cheek. "Ugh, go away."

Kai sits down next to her, his teeth crunching on feathers and bone. There's a dead crow in his hands, in his mouth. She sees the ribcage like a hull in a black feathered sea and scrambles to her feet. He tosses the carcass into the creek with a sigh. "It tastes the same. Boring."

She watches the half eaten bird float downstream. "You're gonna be sick now," she says, with a hint of triumph.

But Kai only shrugs. "I'm sick, you're sick, we're all sick. Wanna see some fish?"

"There's no fish in the creek dummy."

Black feathers blot his smile. "They come out if you feed them."

Kai leaps nimbly from rock to rock, clambering down trees with the ease of a fox. Bonnie follows slowly, scraping her knees a few times.

"In there," he points to a cave submerged in the water. "Look."

"I don't see anything."

He pulls her down by the hand so they're crouched on a rock. His clothes smell of old cigarette smoke and she wrinkles her nose.

"Look," he says again and she does. There, in the dark, one by one the eyes pop open, until the cave mouth is full of little glowing bubbles.

"Watch this," Kai says, retrieving a bird's leg from his pocket. He tosses it at the small lights and they _flock_. They're like no fish she's ever seen in books or on TV. Green, black, glowing, eyes hung on antennae like lanterns. And teeth, rows and rows of jagged teeth.

They make quick work of the wing and swarm towards the shore. Kai dabbles his fingers in the water and she slaps it back. "Stop that! They'll eat your hand."

"They won't eat me. I feed them."

"You're insane."

"Like I haven't heard that before," he huffs, clearly bored.

The fish bob around his hand, their marble eyes flickering excitedly.

"People say nothing can live in this creek," Bonnie says, mesmerized by the strange glowing fleshy bodies.

"Nothing they wanna see," Kai replies, smiling at the fish nuzzling his hand.

* * *

The creek used to be a river, once upon a time. Mystic Falls got its name from a waterfall that no one remembers anymore.

Everything changed when the Salvatore Corp reactor exploded. Poison gas choked the sky and the trees and killed all the birds. Only the crows ever came back. Toxic sludge oozed and oozed like lava until the river could take no more. It was like a chemical volcano exploding. Some locals joked grimly that Pompeii had nothing on Mystic Falls.

The government quickly imposed a quarantine, no one was allowed in or out. People tried, they protested. And one by one, they were taken away, at night, in the backs of unmarked vans, carried by men in faceless masks and white glowing suits.

Eventually, people stopped trying. They buried their family members too young from cancers that killed you before you knew you were sick, they found what work they could, they married. Some of them even managed to have children who lived.

Some people said nothing grew in Mystic Falls except cancer. Tumors like deadly fruit blossoming and ripening in the poisoned soil of people's bodies. The poison flowed through them like a river, mother to child, husband to wife, generation to generation, sowing itself in their cells over and over, a lineage no one could escape.

No, nothing grew here. Nothing they wanted to see.

* * *

She's fifteen when she finds Matt Donovan and his football buddies throwing Kai around like a ragdoll. She puts down her backpack and rushes into the fray, pulling at their jackets and begging them to stop.

Finally, she screams.

Her vision blurs a little. The boys scatter like dandelion to lie in the dust at her feet. Matt stares at her in shock and hate.

She grabs Kai's hand and they run. They don't stop until they reach the creek.

No one follows them here, especially not Matt and his healthy friends and their budding baseball scholarships. And so they sit on their favorite rock and she finally gets a good look at Kai's face. He has a black eye and a swollen lip, bootprints on his hands that had tried to protect his head from kicks and blows. He's an easy target, thin and strange looking and always eating weird stuff. Sometimes she thinks she made him up. Sometimes she hates him, wishes he would just _act normal_. He'd only reply in that singsong voice, _I'm sick you're sick we're all sick_ , until she got tired and gave up.

She blots his bloody face with her t-shirt. He wipes the rest of it himself and licks his fingers clean. Three years since he complained about the taste of her grandmother's brains and his eating habits no longer shock her. It's his own special sickness, he told her once. He can't taste anything, never could. Not baby formula, not cereal, not blood, not sugar. Nothing.

He makes a face at her. "Why're you crying?"

She scowls, wiping her face. "Shut up."

"Can I taste one?" he points at the tear rolling down her cheek, a request he's made before.

"No," she replies, as always. "Does your face hurt?"

He shrugs, leaning back on his elbows. "I'll take some of mom's Vicodin when I get home. Last time was a _trip_."

"Just don't get caught," she warns with a sigh, lying down next to him so their heads touch. Her tears dry in the fading sun. She wishes they could run somewhere else, somewhere farther than the creek, farther than the mountains, somewhere without sickness in the soil.

They fall asleep holding tight to the other's hand, the same way they'd run here, ready to run again.

* * *

Sheriff Saltzman comes to her house later to ask questions about "the incident" at school. Rudy's asleep, so Bonnie lets him into the kitchen and offers him a glass of water.

She answers his questions quietly, with a hint of sullenness. "They were hurting my friend so I told them to stop."

"Oh yeah, Kai Parker," he says, putting his glass down and wiping his mouth. "Girls like you should stay away from that kid. He's sick in the head."

She bites the inside of her cheek to keep from yelling something that would land her in trouble. She doesn't want to see the backseat of the Sheriff's car. She's heard it smells like piss and cigarettes. "He's my friend," she repeats.

The Sheriff comes to stand in front of her. Her eyes level with his shirt, the shiny badge, the bobbing apple in his throat. "Are you sure Kai isn't _more_ than a friend, Bonnie?"

When she doesn't answer, his fingers slide under her chin and force her gaze up. "Tell me the truth."

"Kai is my friend," she says, clenching her jaw. The Sheriff's eyes narrow some, flicking down her frame like she's hiding a lie under her shorts and t-shirt.

"I'm your friend too, Bonnie," he says, softly, like he's explaining something very secret to her. "You know that right?"

She doesn't want to look at his face, to give him this. She senses something lurking beneath his question, something malformed that slithers around her ankle and rests there, watching, breathing.

"You're too old to be my friend," she replies, her heart pounding in her chest. The Sheriff's eyes grow hard, his fingers pinching her chin. Bonnie feels a twinge along her skull and the light bulb flickers on and off in the kitchen.

"Bonnie - are you down there?" Rudy's voice bellows from the bedroom. Her father stumbles into the kitchen and the light returns to normal. He squints through bloodshot eyes at her and the Sheriff. The latter slides away from her. Her chin is cold where his fingers gripped.

The two men exchange some words and the Sheriff is on his way, but not without a careful glance in her direction that slips past her father's boozy gaze. Bonnie opens her mouth, feeling a scream lodged in her throat that tries to form words. _I don't want to be the Sheriff's friend. Please don't make me be his friend._

"What are you doing still awake?" Rudy mumbles, shuffling to the fridge. "Go the hell to sleep, girl."

The pop of a beer can makes her jump, drains the words from her body.

Bonnie pushes past him upstairs.

* * *

The next night she finds Kai at the creek, his hands bloody and coated in golden fur. She gapes at the feeding frenzy below him, a hundred fleshy toothy bodies swarming a floundering dog.

"Bon bon," he greets her, licking his fingers with his customary look of boredom. "Guess what? Dogs don't taste like anything either."

The last of the golden retriever's pitiful whines bubble and disappear underwater. Bonnie glimpses a desperate pink tongue, terror-marbled eyes and the bloody end of a snout.

"Oh my god - ," she cries out, rushing to the edge. But the fish are many and hungry, feasting in a cloud of blood. "Kai - who's-,"

"Matt Donovan's bestest _friend_ in the whole world," he says cheerily, smiling that red-tooth smile. "I bet he got the dog to suck his dick too."

There's that word again. _Friend_. It makes her nauseated. She's choking on the smell of wet dog and hot blood.

Kai peers down into her face. Tries to poke a finger at her cheek. He's noticed the tears before she did, eyes gleaming with need. "Just one? Please?"

Bonnie hits him across the face. Once, twice, three times. He tries to fight back but she descends on him like a storm, a flurry of punches and kicks and gnashing teeth.

"Is that what friends do Kai?" she screams, seizing his shirt and shaking him, clinging and clawing at the same time. "ANSWER ME!"

They tumble to the ground together, she climbs on top of him and slaps his face his chest. Her eyes run and run with salt, wetting her hands. Kai only takes her blows, like she's a deluge of Vicodin - a trip - his mouth open, seeking, turning to taste the moisture on her hands.

"ANSWER ME!" she growls, but he's too mesmerized by her flying hands, how they land so close to his mouth yet never give him a taste. He's panting like he's run miles. Her friend, her very own dog. He'd come when she'd called, hadn't he, the day she found Sheila dead? He'd come, trotting and hungry, her scream like a collar around his neck.

"A-answer me," she says, softly, sliding down from her frenzy.

Below them, in the tainted water, the meal is completed. A skeleton draped in mottled gold floats downstream. The fish, bobbing and swishing, return to their little cave and huddle together. If she closes her eyes, she can hear their jaws clicking, savoring the taste of meat and bone.

He pokes her in the stomach. "I used to feed the fish alone. Then I met you."

 _Feed_. She tries on that word for size. It's not like _friend_. It's naked and ugly and hungry. It's simple and bare-toothed. Something she can grasp. Something she can _give_.

She eases forward onto the hungry boy under her.

"Open your mouth."

 _Plop, plop._ The tears fall and dissolve on his tongue. His entire body jerks and twitches, like a landed fish. He gulps and swallows and opens his mouth wider, eyes rolling back in his head.

He's breathing so fast, her sick little puppy.

"You taste - you taste - _fuck_ -," he manages, in between drops of her. When at last her eyes are empty, Bonnie lowers her face to his. His tongue laves her cheeks. Bathes them. He's keening all the while like some wounded animal, like Matt Donovan's dog when its flesh was being torn from its body, moaning as he slobbers her salt skin, " _Unh_ \- mm-mm - _unhhhnmm_ -fffuckfuck _fuck_ -,"

There's a twinge of heat between her legs. It flares when Kai begins nibbling the soft flesh of her face. Their hips rock together, fully clothed. His teeth make her hiss. Little tugs and hungry bites. She imagines herself floating, a hundred tiny mouths pulling at her flesh, taking bits and pieces until she's disappeared down a hundred throats and all that's left is blissful empty bone-

" _Ahh_ -," she shudders, her cunt pulsing while Kai's hips push taut and then go still. She feels his crotch dampen.

He's still licking her face. Bonnie takes hold of his dark hair, grips him to her.

They lie like conjoined fish, tumbled out of the womb together.

* * *

Abby Bennett died giving birth to her, poisoned by her daughter's blood, platelets warring and clashing and sending her body seizing into death before the doctors knew what was happening. When she was little Bonnie pored over the handful of photographs of her mother that Rudy stashed away. To her, the woman in the pictures - thin and bright-eyed with a smile too eager - looked like a puppet, an empty mockery of her mother. Her real mother, she imagines, is bigger than the frame of any photo, something no one wanted to see.

Kai's mother lived through his birth. His twin sister didn't. The doctors pulled a shriveled dead baby girl from between Ida Parker's legs and discovered her fluids gone, siphoned into her twin's body.

"I sucked her out. Like a juice box," Kai told her once, licking his lips like he could still remember what his sister tasted of.

Bonnie thinks they might be kin.

Isn't that what you do when you're part of someone? You open your mouth, latch onto whatever they give. You feed and feed some more.

But unlike her dead mother and his shriveled twin, she wouldn't fade, Kai wouldn't wither. They would grow and grow like the sickness in their cells. Feeding, always feeding.

* * *

The Sheriff is in her kitchen again, and her father is asleep.

"Did your _friend_ Kai do something to the Donovan's dog?"

"No," Bonnie replies simply.

He sidles towards her. "Bonnie, you know -,"

"He's not my friend anymore," she adds, with a small smile because it's true. And the Sheriff would never know. No one would. People didn't like to see what grew, here in the poisoned earth and water, under dead trees and empty skies. "And I'll show you where he did it."

The Sheriff's grin is a mile wide, wide enough to span a river, map a highway out of town.

* * *

He's brought his personal car, like he's visiting a _friend_.

The streets are quiet at night. Bonnie sits in the passenger seat and keeps smiling at him, while his hand squeezes her knee at every stoplight.

"You know I always thought we'd be good friends, Bonnie," he says, giving her a sidelong glance while his fingers inch higher on her leg. "Your grandmother was wrong about you."

Her body jerks some, and she has to catch her smile quickly before it slips. "What- what did Grams say?"

His hand brushes the hem of her dress. "Doesn't matter now. You know how narrow minded some people are, how afraid. They don't want to see what makes people different. What makes them special."

Bonnie's eyes drift to the gun belt around his waist and notices, for the first time, the baton affixed there. And she sees her grandmother on that sun-baked porch, her skull cracked open like an egg.

The car engine flares and dies. She feels a twinge across her forehead as the vehicle spins off the road, the Sheriff swearing and grasping at the wheel, scrambling for control. They skid and slam to a stop on the gravel leading to the creek.

Bonnie clambers out of the car, ignoring his shouts and curses.

She runs.

* * *

She runs past the bony trees and rocks, startling the crows. The Sheriff is yelling somewhere behind her, heavy footfalls following her close.

She sees the days and weeks spinning out before her. Her father's bleary eyes. The Sheriff's creeping fingers. Her grandmother's empty house.

Bonnie clambers down the rocks that she and Kai had descended so many times.

"Come back here!" the Sheriff shouts, looking down at her from from the boulder. She sees the fear beneath his anger, the fear that won't let him get too close to the polluted water.

"Bonnie!"

She jumps.

* * *

The water is warm, like the inside of someone's mouth. It's familiar salty taste reminds her of an infant hunger, a suckling of which she has no memory.

Bonnie breaks the surface with a smile. She knows he'll be there, peeking over the Sheriff's shoulder, her counterpart, her hungry twin.

Kai returns her grin. Then he pushes the Sheriff into the creek.

* * *

There's a moment when, as the Sheriff flounders and grabs at her, she worries that he'll pull her under. But the worry vanishes as the fish swarm around them, their fleshy bodies bouncing and jostling her without biting. She swims easily to the rocks while they make a banquet of him.

* * *

It takes a lot longer than the dog. His cries fade into gurgles as the creek bubbles with his blood and a hot, steaming scent rises from the water.

Bonnie savors the taste of it all, lying naked on the stones while Kai licks her dry.

Once he's sucked each of her toes clean she flips onto her stomach so he can start all over. She feels like a cherry being rolled around his tongue. He laves the curve of her back and she moans.

"What do I taste like?" she pants, over her shoulder. Kai bites and sucks on the roundness of her ass, over and over until the skin is red and tingling.

"I don't know- ," he replies, between frenzied movements of his tongue, "- apples?"

Bonnie shifts, turning over to rest on her elbows. He stares, dazed and open-mouthed, at her exposed body. Her knees, her thighs, her breasts. The soft curve of her belly and the triangle of dark hair between her legs. His eyes are teeth, rolling her between them. "You don't even know what apples taste like," she teases, nudging her legs slightly apart.

He licks his lips, mesmerized by the offer. "Maybe apples taste like you...," he trails off, stroking the soft patch of hair. Bonnie thinks of how her tears coated his tongue, how he lapped them like a dog. She wants to feed him again, and again, to collar him up in what she gives. In what only she can give.

She widens her thighs.

She doesn't think this is what the girls at school whispered and giggled about. Kai has no thought for pleasing her, he isn't trying to make her feel good. He nibbles on her folds like they're slices of peach he could never taste. His fingers pinch and roll her clit between them, sucking it into his mouth like a gumball, like he could make it dissolve. The moisture that dribbles out of her he laps like it's Capri Sun. The favorite soda he never got to have. The frosting on birthday cakes he never tasted. Like blood, like milk.

"Mmmm- ohh god, ahhh- _yeah yeah -_ ,"

She collars his back with her ankles and whines as his mouth feasts on her. Like the fish down below, feeding. She thinks about the Sheriff's body disappearing into nothing and a violent shudder goes through her, goes on and on, builds from the center upwards until she's screaming. Only this time it's not a scream for her dead grandmother, or for a bicycle no one bought her, or an apple tree that never grew, a childhood that never was. It was for this throbbing, inescapable sickness that has her thrashing with ecstasy while Kai gulps her down and nearby some man or dog is eaten alive.

It's for the hands and feet and mouth that thrust through dead soil, twisting in search of a different kind of light.

* * *

Nothing grew here. Nothing but them.

They take his wallet, his keys, his car. Before they leave town, they make one stop at Sheila Bennett's burial plot and Bonnie plants the Sheriff's baton there, down in the unmarked earth.

Dawn chasing their heels, they follow the river's dead pathways west.


End file.
